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Thank you,

Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison
Co-Directors, CPD

We Call for the United States to End Its Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan!
A Statement from the Campaign for Peace and Democracy
October, 2009

This may be a turning point for the expanding U.S. wars in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, a time when speaking out clearly
and unambiguously against war can make a crucial difference.
Today we see signs all too reminiscent of the step-by-step
deepening of the U.S. commitment to the war in Vietnam in
the 1960’s. In response, we declare ourselves firmly
against military escalation in the region and for the
withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and
Pakistan now. We also call for an end to drone attacks in
both countries.

There are currently 108,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan.
President Obama has authorized increasing U.S. forces by
21,000, which will mean more than 68,000 U.S. troops by the
end of 2009. In view of the war’s growing
unpopularity, Obama may very well abandon troop escalation.
Reportedly, some in the Administration even recommended
reducing U.S. forces and focusing more on strikes against
Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But even a scaled-back
military presence constitutes an illegitimate occupation,
one that wreaks havoc on the lives of innocent civilians and
can only strengthen the Taliban and terrorist networks such
as Al Qaeda.

Americans are increasingly disillusioned with the war.
According to an August CNN poll, 57 percent oppose the
Afghan war, a 9 percent increase since May, and there is
growing unease in Congress. The cynical spectacle of
Afghanistan’s fraudulent presidential election has further
eroded what little domestic and international credibility
the corrupt Karzai regime retained.

In both Afghanistan and Pakistan the actions of the United
States and its allies serve to strengthen fundamentalist
forces. Fearing unpopular NATO troop casualties, the U.S.
relies heavily on air power, which inevitably results in the
death of innocent civilians. Far from eliminating terrorist
networks, these air strikes only deepen popular hostility to
the U.S./NATO war effort, pushing growing numbers of Afghans
and Pakistanis toward the Taliban. Already fully a quarter
of the Afghan population thinks that attacks on U.S./NATO
forces are justified.

In Pakistan, the war is now being fought with the open and
heavy involvement of U.S. Predator and other drones.
Because of the frequent killing of civilians by the drones,
on top of the resentment caused by Washington’s long
support of the dictator Musharraf, Pakistani public opinion
now rates the U.S. as the number one threat -- ahead even of
India, Pakistan’s long time enemy.

U.S. actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan take place in the
context of a global military system much more massive and
far-flung than most Americans realize. Officially, over
190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are stationed
in approximately 900 military facilities in 46 countries and
territories -- and the actual numbers are far greater. U.S.
military spending of more than $600 billion a year, in the
words of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, “adds up
to about what the entire rest of the world combined spends
on defense.”

The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan have been part of
a comprehensive effort to assert U.S. strategic power and
credibility, in the Central and South Asian region and
globally -- the power to control energy supplies, to overawe
rivals, to intervene wherever Washington deems necessary,
and to engage other countries in U.S. power projection.
Since 2001, the United States has established 19 new bases
in Afghanistan and neighboring countries, inserting a
military presence into an area that Russia and China also
seek to influence.

Afghanistan was a devastated nation even before 2001, due to
the destruction wrought by the Soviet occupation and the
subsequent civil war. Since then the Afghan people have
endured eight more years of war and misery. Many Afghans
felt a sense of liberation when the Taliban was driven from
power, but it soon became clear that one set of oppressors
had been replaced by another: by the warlords and drug
traffickers of the former Northern Alliance and the
U.S./NATO occupiers.

The Taliban’s misogyny was vicious and extreme, but
the situation of women remains horrific. Although a large
number of Afghan girls did go to primary school after 2001
and some did get elected to the parliament, the vast
majority of women are still confined to their homes, unable
to work, too fearful to attend school and forced into
marriages, often as children. Many women who would prefer
not to wear their burqas are afraid to be seen without them.

According to Afghan feminist leader Malalai Joya,
“Victims of abuse and rape find no justice because the
judiciary is dominated by fundamentalists. A growing number
of women, seeing no way out of the suffering in their lives,
have taken to suicide by self-immolation.” President
Karzai signed a disgraceful law earlier this year, applying
to Shia women, that gives a husband the right to withdraw
basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she
refuses to obey his sexual demands. It grants guardianship
of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers,
requires women to get permission from their husbands to
work, and effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution
by paying “blood money” to his victim.

Most Afghans lack access to safe drinking water and medical
care. The country remains one of the world’s
poorest. The U.S. has done virtually nothing to alleviate
this terrible poverty; instead, it has added to the
suffering of the Afghan people, women as well as men, the
constant threat of military violence. The Taliban gains
strength in response to the grossly inadequate amount of
foreign aid, as well as to the brutalities of the U.S./NATO
war.

The Pakistani military and intelligence have long played a
double game, taking military aid from Washington while
simultaneously fighting and backing the Taliban. While the
majority of Pakistanis oppose the Taliban today, underlying
conditions enable it to grow stronger. Many of the
country’s poor live in near-feudal conditions. In the
Swat Valley the Taliban was able to exploit the grievances
of landless rural tenants for its own reactionary purposes.
Unwilling and unable to address the social and economic
realities that create support for or at least acquiescence
to the Taliban among many in the population, the Pakistani
military and elite will well make further concessions to
the fundamentalists.

If the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan have any chance of
defeating fundamentalism, fighting misogyny and winning
genuine democracy, the U.S. can help mainly by calling off
the inhumane and un-winnable “war on terror,” by
whatever name, and replacing it with a radically different
policy of massive foreign aid and an end to support for
elites and governments that perpetuate gross inequalities.
Democratic forces may be weak, but they will never grow
stronger while the U.S. occupies Afghanistan, sends
missiles into Pakistan and bolsters corrupt governments in
both countries.

Withdrawal should not mean that the U.S. abandons any effort
to help the people of Afghanistan and neighboring states.
Washington ought to lend political support to regional
negotiations and to a broader settlement of the disputes
between India and Pakistan, which continue to stoke the
violence in Afghanistan. Above all, the U.S. should provide
large-scale humanitarian aid to the desperately poor Afghan
population -- which, aid agencies note, is hindered by being
intermingled with military operations.

Afghanistan is badly fragmented along ethnic lines. If there
is any progressive solution to these divisions it probably
lies in regional negotiations among Afghanistan's neighbors.
We cannot foresee what form this solution might take, but we
know it must not include any political dictation by
Washington or the continuation of U.S. troops or military
operations in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

Ending U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and
Pakistan now is not only right in itself; it is also
indispensable as a way to begin countering the bitterness
and hostility in Muslim countries that breeds terrorist
threats to our own security, threats that arise from
networks that are not limited to any specific geographic
location. In addition to ending military intervention in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, the United States should withdraw
its forces from Iraq, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. It
must end all support to Arab autocracies and police states
and give real support to Palestinian statehood. A truly
democratic U.S. foreign policy is desperately needed to
address the misery and inequity in Afghanistan, Pakistan and
many other countries, but we can only begin to do so by
diverting our country’s vast wealth away from
militarism and the drive for “full spectrum
dominance” of the world. We, the undersigned, are
dedicated to working for this new foreign policy.